Cause

The latest previous release of the maven-deploy-plugin was over 4 years prior. The latest plugin release version will automatically be used if the project POM or Maven invocation does not explicitly state a version of the plugin to use.

Workaround #2

The maintainers of the maven-deploy-plugin have acknowledged the regression and provided advice on how to change the deployment URL so that the latest releases of the plugin will work. See this comment.